YASMIN: Efficient Intra-node Communication Using Generic Sockets

Nowadays, virtual machines are becoming widely used and their range of applications include a large number of scientific fields. From HPC to IaaS, communication between co-located VMs is a critical factor of efficiency. In our paper, we examine communication methods between VMs located in the same physical node, optimizing communication cost without sacrificing upper-layer API compatibility. We present YASMIN (Yet Another Shared Memory Implementation for Intra-Node), a generic socket-compliant framework for intra-node communication in the Xen hypervisor. We build on the concept of Vchan, a Xen library for intra-node communication between different VMs and we use Xen granting and signaling mechanisms to provide an efficient communication framework. The key of our design is the transport layer which runs underneath the AF_VSOCK protocol family, implemented as a dynamically inserted module. We are able to achieve 4.4x higher bandwidth rate and 65% lower latency without the need of application binary recompilation.